B.C. man laments complaint wait times as Human Rights Tribunal tackles backlog

Rich Barron says he's been waiting well over a year for a human rights complaint to be screened.

A Vancouver Island couple is frustrated and angry after filing a human rights complaint that’s gone nowhere in 16 months.

Rich Barron filed the complaint on behalf of his partner, Brenda Urquiaga, who claims she was racially profiled at a Langford grocery store.

Urquiaga was not available for an interview, but previously spoke with CTV News. The Filipino woman said in August of 2023, security removed her from a grocery store after mistaking her for someone previously caught shoplifting.

Three months later, Barron filed a complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT).

“They originally told me that the process takes between nine and 12 months,” Barron said in an interview.

The couple recently learned the complaint has yet to be screened.

“I understand that maybe they are backed up, but well over a year to be screened for cases, I feel, is completely unacceptable,” he said.

“It makes Brenda extremely sad because … it feels like she is put on the backburner because of who she is.”

The tribunal said the delay is due to a massive backlog of complaints, which have been piling up since the pandemic.

“From 2020 onwards, people were filing essentially… more than double the number of complaints that we had the capacity to process each year,” BCHRT chair Emily Ohler said.

Prior to the pandemic, the tribunal had a team of roughly 30 people, which could handle 1,100 cases a year. Over the past few years, Ohler said the tribunal has been receiving between 2,537 to 3,192 complaints annually.

The influx resulted in 4,000 “overflow cases,” which are complaints that get carried over to the next year.

“We are committed to … helping people resolve these conflicts. It’s hard to not be able to do that in a timely way. We feel people’s frustration, truly,” Ohler said.

“The one thing that I would ask is that people, to the extent that they can, try to be patient and trust that we are doing our best to move things through as quickly as we can.”

In April 2023, the province increased the BCHRT’s funding, which allowed the tribunal to nearly double the size of its team and find efficiencies in its workflow. As a result, Ohler said the growth of the backlog has slowed.

“We generally appear to now have the capacity to process the number of complaints that we get in any given year. However, we still have to catch up from all of those overflow cases that accumulated from years prior,” she said.

Staff are currently screening complaints from late 2023, meaning the delay from filing to screening is one and a half years long.

“That’s still a delay that is too long,” Ohler said. “(However), that is a delay that is significantly less than the delay that we have been facing at any point in time over the past three years, so it is improving.”

Ohler believes the increase in human rights complaints is driven by a greater understanding of discrimination, as movements dedicated to equity and reconciliation grow.